When Words Fail
by FancyFreeThinker101
Summary: He's James Potter, and he walks the halls a considerate egotist, and he defies description. JPLE oneshot. Some foul language.


_This is an experiment. I have never written JPLE before, and I wanted to give it a shot. Let me know what you think._

You're caught in a hailstorm of throbbing synesthesia, peering down the rabbit hole straight across the road less traveled, trying to describe him to yourself.

A trippy mathmetician, you equate him recklessly to this and that and the other, to stars and sickness and sin. Similes fail you; metaphors only leave you confused.

He's James Potter, and he walks the halls a considerate egotist, and he defies description.

You sort of can't stand him.

He laughs too loudly in Potions class at Sirius's jokes, and he's almost never wrong. He waves his wand with his eyes on his friends, and yet it comes out exactly right. McGonagall spits out his name like an expletive from her thin white lips, and he catches it, wraps it with a bow and a cocky smile, and gives it back to her as a present.

And then he's almost not Potter, he verges on James-ness, and the word _Minerva_ is laced in his teeth in red string, insolent and unsaid and obvious. If you tried that, you'd be in detention until your fucking hands fell off.

Yet he gets a smiling reproof, and she walks off almost flattered.

It simply isn't fair.

He's dreadful in Charms, too; he sits right across from you, and he swishes and flicks and whispers "Evans!" at your back and your neck. You sit straight and feign deafness, as your knuckles burn white and orange at the edges and your quill snaps in two and you hate him, you hate him, you fucking _hate_ him and wish he was dead.

But when you walk out of class, the back of your mind treacherously whispers that it would be dull without him.

You're in the common room now, bent over your essay for Transfiguration, puzzling over the right word for him, and he walks in. You know he has; you can feel it. So you pull your orange hair around your white face and try to ignore him.

Before you know it, you're staring.

He defies description, and he's almost a blaring middle finger to the concept of symmetry. Nothing about him is even. Not his wild, wild, accidentally wild hair or his too pointed nose or the cranberry slash of his mouth. His hands are too big and his knees are too knobbly and there's something almost disturbing in the sharp white of his canines.

There are boys much handsomer than he is. You know. You've seen them. Boys much handsomer, boys with Caesar noses and Zeus mouths, boys with better grades and better lives and better _hair_, for God's sake, (that hair you want to mess up _on purpose_), but they're all in the white spaces and the edges and the shadows, watching with envy glinting on their teeth, dripping from the spaces of their clenched fingers.

They hate him, because they're better than him, but he won't acknowledge it. And everyone knows what isn't believed or acknowledged doesn't exist.

He turns, catches you staring, and you look away, pride staining red all over the unsightly white of your cheeks.

"Hey, Evans."

You pinch your orange-red lips together and look away and hate him because you can't classify him, because he's better than you at Transfiguration. Because things just come to him., while you work and bleed and peg you youth away at life.

"Potter."

You stand up and walk away, because he won't charm you, he won't charm you, God damn it…

But then he's draped across the door to the dormitory, smirking firelight at you and slapping on that damn "cocky boy stereotype" smile that makes you sick.

Because you're both stereotypes, pretty, polished ideas on a postcard: he's the swaggering student favorite, the boastful boy extraordinaire who has UV rays on the rims of his glasses and the moon in his wide-mouthed smirk…and you're that girl, the quiet, studious, moody _bitch_ who leaves the boys as soon as they approach her because they aren't someone, they aren't someone, they aren't…

"Sod off," you say, and try to maneuver around him. But he catches you, and his long, pale fingers are digging into your white-shadowed shoulderbones as he keeps you there.

"Evans," he says, and his voice is quiet and intense. "Why don't you like me?"

You jerk away, wary of him and the way he's serious.

James Potter isn't serious. James Potter doesn't care.

"I don't answer stupid questions, Potter," you say coldly, and your hand is on the door, pushing it open. Yet still he's there, and his eyebrows are scrunched over the tops of his glasses, puzzled, a little angry.

He's frustrated at the way History repeats itself, and it shows; if there's one thing you can't say about James Potter, it's that he hides his feelings terribly well. In a stupid way, he's almost vulnerable, and you're angry anew because he's giving you power to hurt him and you wanted to take it by force.

"C'mon, just talk to me, Lily," he says now, a terrible impression of a reasonable adult. To emphasize this, he sits on the arm of a nearby chair, staring up at you almost benevolently. "What's so wrong with me?"

You're a defective soldier hiding from the truth, so you take refuge in sarcasm.

"Nothing, of course. What could be wrong with the Great James Potter?"

His eyebrows, haphazard dabs of ink, ascend.

"Look, I'm trying to talk to you, Evans."

"And I'm trying not to. Goodnight, Potter."

You turn again, and prepare to sweep with angry elegance up the steps—

"Evans, what the fuck is your _problem_?"

Your problem. He wants to know your _problem_. The great James Potter, the wild, rakish, uneven James Potter, the boy who was looked at like a fucking Gryffindor _founder_, wanted to know your _problem_. As if he doesn't already know. As if the whole damn world doesn't know.

Your problem is that you're Lily Evans, and you marvel at the unnamed adjectives glinting on his cheekbones.

"My problem is _you_, Potter," you hiss, outraged that he dare talk to you like that, like you _owe _him something. You don't fucking owe him anything. Your tongue is loose now, and the fingers you always imagined clamping your throat are loose too. In the most primal, female sense of the word, you let him have it.

"You—you think you're the damn _world_ because everyone thinks you're so bloody brilliant. I don't _care_ if you're better than me at Transfiguration, okay?! I don't fucking _care_ if you shagged a girl in Ravenclaw and Professor McGonagall said you had potential! And I _really really _don't care if everyone thinks you're special. I just. Don't. CARE."

He sits there, and his pomegranate smear of a mouth is open, gaping a little, and his eyes are startled and contemplative. He's calm and almost philosophical and you—you feel like Medusa, all writhing orange snakes and stones.

Finally, his mouth closes—opens—closes again, and he speaks.

"I don't care either, Evans."

Oh.

You're crying now, sad and angry and so damned vulnerable and you showed him everything in you, all the thorns and bile and slow rot, and now who'll want you. Not him, not the boy with the world in his hands like the apple of Eden.

You told him your sin, the catalyst for your gnawing, and he shrugged his shoulders. It's nothing to him, and he doesn't care about it. But it's the axis that your world turns on. You exist academically to top James Potter.

You're still crying—still crying, and it's humiliating and you feel soggy and debased, knocked down off of whatever little shrine he had for you.

No one wants a broken idol.

"Lily," he says, and he stands up, suddenly all glasses and legs. "Lily—God, you're so _stupid_."

That's you. Stupid little Lily. The girl who wanted space travel from the basement.

"Sod _off_, Potter," you say angrily, as salt drips down your face and your nose and your eyes burn red at him.

You hate him, this boy who defies your boxes and files, this boy who flits from stereotype to stereotype, this boy who sometimes doesn't fit any of them.

You hate him, and his hand is on your waist, drawing you close to him.

You hate him, and his other hand is clumsy on your cheek, bringing your uninteresting face up to his.

You still hate him, and his forehead is against yours.

You really, really, really hate him, and he's kissing you now, sucking out your soul and toying with it in his mouth.

You hate him, but it feels better than loving anyone else, so you grab at his twists of black hair and pull him so close that his glasses press cold and damp against your hot, aching cheeks.

He's James Potter, and he disgusts you and he's sort of decent and you just can't decide.

He's James Potter and your fingers trace the hollows in his cheeks and under his eyes and you still can't describe him.

But he's James Potter, and you're Lily Evans…and you're going to learn.


End file.
